Ecommerce Marketing Blog

Website Builder Heaven - A Guide to HTML

Having and creating a website is no longer the domain of highly technical webmasters anymore. Today it is common for everyone from kids to professionals, and even senior citizens to carve out their own little space online. Whether a website is a serious, business network or simply a personal blog, it certainly helps to know the basics about HTML and other web programming languages. Especially in the case of HTML, learning the language is actually far easier than it might seem. One of the best ways to learn is to arm yourself with a tutorial and jump right in! The resources below will help you to get started.

Basic HTML Tags

The main feature of HTML is known as tags. Tags can be used to format content, to create links, or to specify the behavior of an object. An example of a tag is to create bold text. This type of tag is an opening tag. HTML tags need to be closed so that the browser knows where to end the command. In the example above, the closing tag would be . The content that is meant to be bolded should be in between the opening and closing tags.

Apart from having static content on a website, adding in interactive content helps visitors to get more out of the site. One type of interactive content is a form. Forms are a bit similar to physical paper forms: they contain fields, checkboxes, or other areas where people can fill out information and the submit it. Forms can be used for contact purposes, surveys, fulfilling orders, and many other reasons. It is important implement the forms carefully so that submitted data is private.

In the case of dynamic web pages, some of the content requires a program to process it. For example, if general users are allowed to add content to a publicly viewable website, they would first be asked to input the data. A CGI program might then take that data and process it in order to add it to an existing webpage. Finally, it would generate a result which would show the webpage with the newly added text. There are a couple of ways to get started with CGI scripts. An easy, quick way is to use scripts that have already been created by others. There are many such scripts freely available online. Advanced users can try to modify these scripts or create entirely new scripts by coding it themselves.

Frames are a way of creating separate areas of content within one screen. Behind the scenes, each frame is actually a separate html document. The actual page that the user sees has code that divides the page into several areas and specifies which document should be pulled into each area. Using frames can be a little tricky, so programmers need to test out the final page in several different browsers to ensure that it looks the same for all users.

HTML and other languages, such as PHP and JavaScript can be used to create a variety of user experiences online. Apart from using tags to format content, websites can also make use of databases to present or write content. A great example of a website that uses a programmed database is an online shopping cart. The actual website is what customers see. The database is the program that runs behind the website. It is responsible for updating inventory levels, saving customer account information, and helping orders to be processed.

Java is a programming language that can be used to create small programs called applets. Applets can be embedded within a webpage to add extra interactive functionality. A small sample of Java applets include games, image processing, and graphing functions. Java is not to be confused with JavaScript, which is a different language. JavaScript can be used within HTML code to add additional formatting to content, or to include more sophisticated interactive functions to the page.